With animated videos, the movie file/files can be compressed A LOT more than a standard video and still look all right. I was able to put LBT 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 on one disk WITH all of the menus and everything. I'm sure Universal could fit a lot more onto one of the tv episode disks.
Think of it this way. I can take a DVD rip of a LBT movie that's usually 700mb and I can increase it's size to 5gb or even higher. The quality isn't more, but it takes up more space. That's what they've done with the tv eps so they can excuse taking up an entire disk for 4 episodes. I've played around and I was able to get 12 episodes on one disk without noticeable degradation even on my uncles 42" widescreen TV. Even DVD quality disks shouldn't be more than 2,500kps and have a higher resolution than the standard....720x480 or 1280x720 or 1920x1080(HD DVD). If they encoded DVDs right, they wouldn't take up any more than a gig or 2. A standard DVD is 4.2gb, and a dual layer is 8 something (I'm not sure. I don't use dual layer.). More compression is possible and realistic with animated movies.
As my own recent study of video compression has shown, it is no surprise that EVERY DVD has compressed video, sound, etc. You see, when I did a DV recording of my VHS version of LBT 2 and put it in BEST quality with my VHS converter, I found the movie alone (From the WARNING notice up to when the credits ended.) to be over 16 GB. (Which I got rid of after I was done compressing it into a 550 .wmv file. (Note: Still learning how to compress properally here. Give me a break.)) Yeah, that's pretty big, but think of it this way...
It is UNCOMPRESSED in all fields. So it is no surprise it takes up so much space. Copyright DVDs use .vob format, which is a nice start for compressing video, sound, etc. Just about any DVD ripper out there can take the .vob format and compress it into a smaller file, or even uncompress it into a bigger file, some of which are incredibly simple in doing so. (Magic being one of several I've tried myself that I highly recommend for any beginner in this.) Of course, seeing how LBT 2 alone is over 16 GB when uncompressed from a VHS, it makes you wonder just how big the 2 hours or longer movies were back then. (My prediction says that the 3 hour and 6 minute long Titanic would be 40 GB+. Now there's a big file for ya. :blink:)
For the sake of our computers, lets be glad it's all compressed. I could definately see Universal fitting the whole TV Series onto 2 to 3 disks without wasting the quality of it. Sadly, their head wants money more than anything right now, so we have to suffer with 3 times as many. -_-
